Language is constantly evolving, particularly in some communities. Not everybody is ready for it at all times. I, for instance, cannot stand that my community is now constantly “cooking” or “cooked”, that people in it are “locked in” or “cracked.” I don’t like it, because the use of the words primarily signals membership of a group rather than one’s individuality. But some of the changes to that language might now be coming from … machines? Or maybe not. I don’t kno...

Last week I listened to episode 70 of the Complimentary podcast. The hosts, Katie and Anthony, were discussing what they think is easy to design and what’s hard. They discussed: Illustrations Notifications Typography Animation Form design They both seemed to agree that form design is easy. Although Katie did temper that by saying: “Form design could be easy if designers stopped making it so complicated.” She’s got a point. You only have to look at Material Design...

Michael Rabin passed away on April 14,2026. I blogged about him  here .  My post listed results of his that proved upper and lower bounds on problems. My point was that he proved upper and lower bounds for MANY different levels- from decidable to regular. And I am sure I left out some of his results.  Here are some things I did not mention. 1) Rabin and Scott shared the Turing Award in 1976.  My not mentioning it raises the following question: If I want to say someone has an impressive set o...

Minimal Viable Zig Error Contexts May 3, 2026 fn process_file (io: Io, path: [] const u8 ) ! void { errdefer log.err( "path={s}" , .{path}); const fd = try Io.Dir.cwd().openFile(io, path, .{}); defer fd.close(io); // ... } Out of the box, Zig provides minimal and sufficient facilities for error handling — strongly-typed error codes . Error reporting is left to the user. Idiomatic solution is to pass a Diagnostics out paramete...

Four of the five steps in every unary RPC handler are wire plumbing. Pin the service function signature and they fit in one generic adapter per transport. Four of the five steps in every unary RPC handler are wire plumbing. Pin the service function signature and they fit in one generic adapter per transport.

This is a brief and simple [1] explanation of how to adjust the standard sinusoid sin(x) to change its amplitude, frequency and phase shift. More precisely, given the general function: \[s(x)=A\cdot sin(w\cdot x+\theta)\] We’ll see how adjusting the parameters , and affect the shape of s(x) . Each section below covers one of these aspects mathematically, and you can use the demo at the bottom to experiment with the topic visually. Scaling Scaling is conceptually the simples...

The United States added 178,000 jobs in March 2026 alone, with the unemployment rate holding at 4.3 percent — a labor market that, by any historical measure, remains close to full employment. This article pulls together the latest verified figures on how many Americans work, where they work, how long they work, and how those numbers are likely to shift by 2030. Employment in the United States: Key Statistics for 2026 Total nonfarm payroll employment reached approximately 159 mi...

Today was a really nice and sunny day, so I went out with some friends from uni. We went to a Café (no shops open on International Workers' Day) and decided to go to the museum next to it because museums are free with our student ticket thing. The main exhibit in the museum atm is " WOMEN IN THE DARK " by Franziska Greber ; an exhibit about misogyny and violence. Not very fun and whimsical, like the day upto then, but we liked it and we spent a few hours there looking at everything. The ...

Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Individual images of the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3) rocket, the two Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stacks, and the Moon’s south pole: ISRO / NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA Announcement before we begin: I’m excited to welcome Catalyx Space  as a returning sponsor of my independent space writing !  🌗 Having  raised $5.4 million  in seed funding, Catalyx is building fully integrated autonomous labs and re-entry capsules for microgravity and in-space m...

The most influential piece of writing about staff engineers in the last decade has to be Will Larson’s Staff engineer archetypes . He argues that the “staff engineer” title covers at least four very different roles: the team lead, the architect, the solver, and the right hand. This taxonomy gets cited a lot as advice for people who are trying to become effective staff engineers. For both of my promotions to staff engineer, my manager at the time linked me to the “staff engineer archet...

I am a smolweb advocate and, sometimes, I use LLMs. 2026-05-02 19:15 I spend a lot of time thinking about simplicity. Fewer dependencies, lighter pages, tools that do one thing well. So yes, it might look strange that I also spend time talking to large language models. Let me explain where I draw the line, and why I think the contradiction is smaller than it appears. What I avoid I do not use LLMs to generate images, musics or videos. Not because I am against creativity, but because that...

When you start a company in Canada, one of your first decisions is whether to incorporate federally or provincially. Most first-time founders treat this as a paperwork question, but it is not. The legal structure you choose encodes assumptions about who controls the company, who benefits when it succeeds, and who bears the cost when it fails. Those assumptions vary enormously across history and across cultures, and the fact that most tech companies make the same choice tells you something about ...

Should I do something similar? I don't have an academic journal like they do. I would need to find something that would work for a regular web site. I looked for recommendations for BibTeX, and found several suggestions on stackoverflow : @misc{…} @electronic{…} @internet{…} @online{…} The answers on that page and elsewhere were consistent about using title = {…} author = {…} but inconsistent about year = {…} vs originalyear = {…...

It’s so funny how much a creature like this silly dog can change someone’s life. He certainly change mine, for better or for worse, and he also changed me in the process. Both physically and spiritually. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs It’s so funny how much a creature like this silly...

Hello! One of my long term projects on here is figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node or any other server JS runtime. One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how to write tests for them. I’ve tried to use Playwright in the past, but it felt slow and unwieldy to be starting these new browser processes all the time, and it involved some Node code to orchestrate the tests. The result is that I just don’t test my frontend code ...

No, rising house prices are not the driver of sharp fertility declines. The evidence shows only modest, mixed effects that cannot explain the large drops observed in places like Canada. What the Research Actually Shows: A well-known study by Dettling and Kearney (2014) found that rising house prices have opposing effects: they slightly increase fertility among homeowners (via a “home equity” or wealth effect) and slightly decrease it among renters (via a price effect). At average U.S. ho...

I started working on the new Array data type for Redis in the first days of January. The PR landed the repository only now, so this code was cooked for four months. I worked at the implementation kinda part time (kinda because many weeks were actually full time, sometimes to detach yourself from the keyboard is complicated), and even before LLMs the implementation was likely something I could do in four months. What changed is that in the same time span, I was able to do a lot more. This is the ...

Recently I’ve done a three part series building out an uncommon Commodore 64 motherboard and case combo, and posted twice about new tea stores in Sydney . I may have even been working on that aforementioned 8-bit computer while drinking a beverage from one of those establishments. I could have even written and saved a review for the drink, then transferred it to my desktop for publishing onto the site you’re currently engaged with reading. Now, is a word with three letters. I don’t co...

Qiji T1000 quadruped from Dax Robotics, via Reddit . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at chilling effects in the build-to-rent sector, how fast could robot manufacturing scale up, PJM’s new interconnection queue, the backlash against battery storage, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran The latest war-r...

My first thought was the field of pink petals. Day by day, petals fall from the tree as green leaves grow from the blossom. I wonder for how long the petals will keep falling. There seem to be a million dots of pink in spring, through which there is a new perspective to see every day. Yesterday I saw a reflection. Today I saw growth. I hear birds walking among the bushes; grey tits flutter their wings as they move from branch to branch. I paused to look at one bird and then I saw several. With...

I've read a few posts about people leaving GitHub recently, and following my short note to the Fediverse a number of people have piped up saying they're not fans of GitHub, either. From the reading I've done, these frustrations are usually threefold: Microsoft ownership Microsoft training Copilot on open source software Large amounts of downtime In all honesty, none of the factors above really bother me that much. I think that's because I don't rely on GitHub for anything signi...

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C . I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026 , the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a budget of $6,000, and a couple days to benchmark six HPC workloads . Pictured above is t...

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